I'm pretty set on adopting a dog. I check the SPCA website every week and fantasize about after-dinner walks and a happily wagging tail. The main roadblock right now is that my apartment is not dog-friendly. It's also way too big for my partner and I who have an aversion to acquiring what just ends up as “stuff.”

So that's what got us on the apartment hunting circuit. And boy, is it a bummer. Anyone who has looked for an apartment, let alone a pet-friendly one, will attest how onerous the process can be. A few times, we have become so discouraged with the rental options that we've considered buying. Even when we play make-believe and ignore the pricetag, this has presented its own challenges. We cannot find a high-quality (as in you get what you pay for, not a bunch of particle board trying to pass as solid wood) home in a walkable area that issmall enough for our liking.

I'm not talking uber small like the tiny house pictures you have likely seen shared online (Exhibit A: Pinterest). I just mean under 1000 sf. We don't need more than that and with a smaller square footage, we could afford to invest in higher quality build and some solar panels.

In North American cities where land is not the limiting factor, developers build such that more money gets you more space. But increasingly, a large segment of the population would rather pay more money for more place. If we’ve got parks, restaurants, plazas, and workspace we can walk to, why would we need to build those amenities into our homes? In my city, our downtown has the place aspects that we’re looking for, but the housing options leave much to be desired.

Jessop House by Lanefab, Vancouver

Wander with me for a moment.I'm currently drafting a discussion paper on age-friendly communities in our region of Atlantic Canada. What immediately comes to mind at the words 'age-friendly' is senior friendly. In reality we know that communities with universal design to accommodate the elderly, children, and people with disabilities, for example, are more liveable for everyone. So age-friendly really just means people friendly.One of the best recommendations I can make for an age-friendly community is permitting accessory dwelling units (ADUs). For the unfamiliar, ADU is planner-speak for an extra housing unit, be it basement, driveway, loft, or garage added to an existing property (Check out some beautiful examples). But in shorthand, I'm going to refer to these as granny flats because what a fun term, right?It would seem like pure logic to promote granny flats. Assuming it's actually your granny or parents or child living in the granny flat, there is a level of social safety net built in there. Multiple generations can live happily on one property and take care of each other without feeling invasive. If you get along with your family, is there any better way to age in place?Even if you are not related to the dweller of your granny flat, these are a gentle, incremental way of adding density to a neighbourhood. They can provide that critical mass to justify urban amenities like a corner store or more bus stops. They are dignified small quarters, and mesh well with our cultural preference for home-ownership.Finally, they are not just great for students and grannies. Demographics are changing so that we'll have one heck of a lot more grannies soon, but there's also my generation just nearing homebuying age. Let’s go back to my dilemma of picking between: a) bad rentals; or b) oversized homes (if you have a household of 1-2). If I ever buy a house, it'll be a small house and I won't settle for anything more. But where would we put our small house?Goodness knows a Strong Town wouldn't build a Tiny House Crescent far out in the boonies without the infrastructure to support it. But I would sure love to make my small house a granny flat in your laneway.Vancouver has legalized just that. As a result, new developers have sprung up working specifically in laneway construction. Yes, Vancouver has some of the highest land values in the world, but that's kind of the point.If we treated our urban land like it was worth something, we wouldn't make huge parking minimums and ban beautiful, affordable, socially beneficial housing? And yet, many city zoning codes prohibit granny flats. There are certainly areas in the city where granny flats would not be appropriate, so why not let each neighbourhood decide for themselves? Property owners could gain a way to keep multi-generational families together. Or they could split their property tax with someone like me. Young people who do not want a big house or a crummy apartment could afford to build or buy a small house in an existing walkable location.So on the topic of what we can actually do to build Strong Towns (started by Andrew Burleson here), my personal suggestion is to lobby with our neighbours to allow granny flats in our backyards.I believe if we want a fairly quick, decentralized way to balance housing demand and boost supply of affordable housing, we need to legalize and normalize granny flats. For me, for you, and your grandma too.

I spend a lot of time browsing through real estate listings, getting an idea of who owns the buildings I love most and the ones that make me cringe. The other day, I came across exactly the kind of retail storefront property that houses some of my favourite downtown destinations - lively location, exposed brick, beautiful windows, vintage street appeal. Rent is $3,500 a month for ~3000 sqft. including parking. To my knowledge, there is nothing unusual about the rent but at the time the number burned into my brain.If you’re a small business owner and take a gamble on this property, you’ve got to be bringing in over $100 per day just to pay rent. Then there’s the cost of your inventory, wages, marketing, administration, etc. When I think of how small the profit margins are on most of what I buy, and how infrequently I purchase items with large margins this all started to make my head spin. The cafés that serve as our offices, meeting rooms, and third places are earning mere cents on a cup of coffee. Our downtown art store is matching Amazon pricing while paying a team of top-notch staff. How do these places survive? Are the owners just in it as a labour of love?I’ve long been a proponent of the buy local movement for the warm fuzzies. I crave the opportunity to become a welcomed regular at a few favourite places. I love the variety that independent businesses bring to town centres everywhere. I love seeing people take pride in their work, and seeing a community take pride in its local businesses. Warm fuzzies are a powerful motivator but now I can bolster them with an even stronger one: guilt. Not a gross guilt that you want to shake off your back but a guilt carved out of admiration.It was defined a week later for me in this beautiful interview on Fresh Air between Terry Gross and author Ann Patchett who opened a bookstore in Nashville:It's not that I think no one should buy books online. […] But I think that what's important is if you value a bookstore, if that's something that you want in your community, if you want to take your children to story hour, if you want to meet the authors who are coming through town, if you want to get together for a book club at a bookstore or come in and talk to the smart booksellers, if you want to have that experience of a bookstore, then it is up to you.It is your responsibility to buy your book in the bookstore. And that's what keeps the bookstore there. And that's true for any little independent business. You can't go into the little gardening store and talk to them about pesticides and when do you plant and what kind of tools do you need and use their time for an hour and their intelligence and then go to Lowe's and buy your plants for less. That you cannot do.The good guilt reminds me that buying local is how I can help pick up the tab for my beloved town centre. It’s frightening to me how quickly the places and people that I love downtown could be out of business. The window displays that spark warm nostalgia would be gone. The shop-owners that patiently explain why they stock that particular brand and how they test everything out themselves would no longer have an outlet for their passion and knowledge.My partner has wanted to play drums since he was a little kid but could never afford a kit until this year. On four weekends, we walked over to the downtown music store, Tony’s, which is staffed mostly by professional musicians to play and admire the electronic drum kit. Finally one evening it was waiting in boxes for us to bring home. The staff helped us carry it out to the cab. Tony’s never rushed us or side-eyed as we tinkered with expensive equipment. There’s invariably a teenager in the store, playing away on some special guitar they’re saving up to buy. It’s a happy place that embodies the whole journey of musicianship. My partner checked - he would have saved a handful if he bought the kit on Amazon. He considered doing so. But he realized that the Tony’s experience, not just the drum kit was making his childhood dream come true. Buying local has become a bit of a sport for us. We practice “reverse showrooming” - looking up reviews of a product online and then finding a local bricks and mortar retailer from which to buy it - and relish the feel-good of walking in a store and knowing someone will get commission.The good guilt has turned me pretty price insensitive. That’s not to say I’m flush with cash or that the independent retailer is more expensive. It’s just that once I meet my basic needs, it matters to me less how much I acquire than how I acquire it. To enjoy the placemaking benefits of unique local businesses, we need to make sure they can cover their rent too.

I suppose I should probably make this public by now. I've just launched a live vlogumentary sort of thing to share stories of young people and old places. I'll be releasing videos over the year as a new grad and urbanist moving across the country to the Maritimes. No need to talk your head off here though. Just check out the first video and its homebase at Another Place for Me.

I subscribe to a weekly produce delivery box that would appear to be an elitist, luxury indulgence. (And truthfully, it is. There are too many people out there struggling to put food on the table at all. But if you are someone who has the privilege of choice in your groceries, consider the following.) Top quality, organic produce is carefully selected according to my tastes and delivered to my doorstep. The eggs, milk, and yogurt come from farms where cows have names and chickens run free and scratch to their hearts' content. Each week, an insert tells me (with remarkable wit and personality) how the farmers are doing and what meals I can make with that week's bounty. The delivery boxes are reused and equipped with cold-packs and natural wool insulation to keep things cool. This service makes me feel like royalty and I can understand why people might see it and think, "That, my friend, is a luxury I can't afford. I am a poor student and I must eat crappy things until further notice."

Ok, so here's what actually happens when I order this box:

I save 12% per week on my grocery bill. I paused my box delivery for four weeks last month so that needing food would give me a reason to walk to town more often. Curious, I made a spreadsheet after and tracked my grocery expenses during those four weeks vs. box-time expenditures. Yep - my obnoxious organic produce box resulted in me spending 12% less on food every week.

I start talking, singing, dancing about how good vegetables are. Full conversations with my housemate to the tune of, "Um, girl... are you tasting this courgette right now!? I should email them about how good this is. Don't even get me started on that red pepper."

Virtually zero food wastage. I pretty much never throw anything out anymore. They somehow deliver me exactly the right amount of food or I find ways to make it last just long enough. Nothing goes bad before I can eat it.

Variety. I find grocery shopping pretty stressful. I'm just not very good at that kind of decision making and end up turning to a few top-of-mind staples in the produce department. I have to work hard and plan ahead if I want to get creative. With my vegetable box, I'm always getting ingredients that I overlook. Since they deliver small quantities in my box, I'm not forced into repetitive eating through bulk purchase either.

Healthy eating. When your vegetables are that good and that's all the food you have, you eat healthier but don't feel deprived. Case in point, I found myself furtively sneaking into the fridge this evening to snack on cauliflower. I ripped a floret right off the head and ate it. Guilty.

Less impulse buying (and accompanying regret). This relates to cost saving and healthy eating. When I enter a grocery store and actually have to wander around for more than butter and brown rice, the whole experience is like a harshly lit battle between me and the marketing empire. I'm constantly picking things up and putting them back and by the time I leave, my head hurts from convincing myself I don't need stuff and my back aches from carrying the load of things I accidentally bought anyway. Because of course you save money by buying Ben & Jerry's on sale when you wouldn't have actually bought it all in the first place... Right?

Save time. Entire evenings saved because I don't have to schedule around grocery shopping. Now I run quick errands for a few grains, legumes, coffee, condiments, and wine now and then.

Support family-sized producers. This was the initial reason I ordered the box. Short supply chains like veggie boxes allow farmers to be viable on a sustainable, family-friendly scale. Farmers are super. We need more of them that can make a living doing this.

Sharing! At first there was one person in our house ordering these boxes (and another ordering from a different service). Now, half the house is being fed by organic delivery and we can't help but spread the word. It's a delight that sells itself.

Peace of mind. When you order from a supplier you can trust, it removes the stress and anxiety of food-vetting to make sure your groceries are in line with your values. While it seems small, like a nice afterthought, this is one of my favourite things. My veggie box deletes several unpleasant hours and decisions from my week and instead offers (literally) brown paper packages tied up with strings. It makes me feel more human and connected to other humans, cows, and chickens.

Unfortunately, this provider (Abel & Cole) isn't all local, which was my preference in Toronto (Green Earth Organics and Mama Earth Organics will set you up). But in Europe, you can fill in the blanks with beautiful things from Spain during February delivered by freight ship rather than air, which is maybe a good first step? It slightly reduces your typical carbon from food miles while not alienating the vast majority of 2013 northerners unwilling to eat root-veg all winter.

In conclusion: Maybe you can save money, eat healthier, and be happier with a produce delivery box too.

I love cities. I study how they work, how they're designed, how they're paid for, how people and goods flow through and between them, and how they become places we love. If you've ever talked to me over a meal or drink, you probably also know that I love agriculture. While I grew up in the suburbs, it felt like every weekend worth remembering was spent on the farms where my parents grew up.

The other day, I pulled The Essential Agrarian Reader off the library shelf as research for my dissertation. The foreword of the book is written by Kentucky-raised author, Barbara Kingsolver, who so powerfully evoked my own gratitude to a semi-agrarian upbringing that I need to share. Kingsolver resuscitates a memory that I believe provides a better social and ecological blueprint for us moving forward than any dreamy idealism presented by technology-evangelists or the LEED/Green Building crowd. I'm no luddite and I think we should make use of and advance technology as appropriate, but we need to enlist a resilient form of social organization as well and there are some excellent lessons to salvage from the agrarian lifestyle. Admittedly, there's a history and risk of unnecessary hostility to difference when we form insular communities - I don't want to romanticize - but I believe truly thinking like a farmer embodies openness and connectedness if there are channels to exchange ideas with the wider world. And there now are.

On to Barbara. I've chopped up the foreword into my favourite excerpts.

First, she lays out the demise of family farmers, the common indifference demonstrated by some urban folk, and the difficulty in explaining why this disconnect is harmful.

Once in the early eighties, when cigarette smoking had newly and drastically fallen from fashion, I stood in someone's kitchen at a party and listened to something like a Greek chorus chanting out the reasons why tobacco should be eliminated from the face of the earth, like smallpox. Some wild tug on my heart made me blurt out: "But what about the tobacco farmers?"

"Why," someone asked glaring, "should I care about tobacco farmers?"

I was dumbstruck. I couldn't find the words to answer: yes, it is carcinogenic, and generally grown with too many inputs, but tobacco is the last big commodity in America that's still mostly grown on family farms, in an economy that won't let these farmers shift to another crop. If it goes extinct, so do they. I couldn't speak because my mind was flooded with memory, pictures, scents, secret thrills. Childhood afternoons spent reading Louisa May Alcott in a barn loft suffused with the sweet scent of aged burley. The bright, warm days in late spring and early fall when school was functionally closed because whole extended families were drafted to the cooperative work of setting, cutting, stripping, or hanging tobacco. The incalculable fellowship measured out in funerals, family reunions, even bad storms or late-night calvings. The hard-muscled pride of showing I could finally throw a bale of hay onto the truckbed myself. (The year before, when I was eleven, I'd had the less honorable job of driving the truck.) The satisfaction of walking across the stage at high school graduation in a county where my name and my relationship to the land were both common knowledge. But when pressed, that evening in the kitchen, I didn't try to defend the poor tobacco farmer. As if the deck were not already stacked against his little family enterprise, he was now tarred with the brush of evil along with the companies that bought his product, amplified its toxicity, and attempted to sell it to children. In most cases it's just the more ordinary difficulty of the small family enterprise failing to measure up to the requisite standards of profitability and efficiency. And in every case, the rational arguments I might frame in its favour will carry no weight without the attendant silk purse full of memories and sighs and songs of what family farming is worth. Those values are an old currency now, accepted as legal tender almost nowhere.

Then she goes on to explain the importance of an agrarian frame of mind to her life now. Even though she left the farm years ago and remains grateful for her urban experiences, she found herself returning to the land as a way of rejecting the 'hallucinatory fantasy' that is our everyday world. (emphasis mine)

Most of our populace and all our leaders are participating in a mass hallucinatory fantasy in which the megatons of waste we dump in our rivers and bays are not poisoning the water, the hydrocarbons we pump into the air are not changing the climate, overfishing is not depleting the oceans, fossil fuels will never run out, wars that kill masses of civilians are an appropriate way to keep our hands on what's left, we are not desperately overdrawn at the environmental bank, and really, the kids are all right.

Okay, if nobody else wanted to talk about this, I could think about it myself and try to pay for my part of the damage, or at least start to tally up the bill. This requires a good deal of humility and a ruthless eye toward an average household's confusion between need and want. I reckoned I might get somewhere if I organized my life in a way that brought me face-to-face with what I am made of. The values I longed to give my children - honesty, cooperativeness, thrift, mental curiosity, physical competence - were intrinsic to my agrarian childhood, where the community organized itself around a sustained effort of meeting people's needs. These values, I knew, would not flow naturally from an aggressive consumer culture devoted to the sustained effort of inventing and engorging people's wants. [...] It's too easy to ignore damage you don't see and to undervalue things you haven't made yourself. Starting with food. What began as a kind of exercise soon turned into a kind of life, which we liked surprisingly well.

Then she cracks some jokes.

Our gustatory industries treat food items like spoiled little celebrities, zipping them around the globe in luxurious air-conditioned cabins, dressing them up in gaudy outfits, spritzing them with makeup, and breaking the bank on advertising, for heaven's sake. [...] I'd rather wed my fortunes to the sturdy gal-next-door kind of food [...]

Then she explains one of the million reasons I love my parents. Although, I have yet to make the cheese and would probably need some supervision with the hens.

Our agrarian education has come in as a slow undercurrent beneath our workaday lives and the rearing of our children. [...] Our children know how to bake bread, stretch mozzarella cheese, ride a horse, keep a flock of hens laying, help a neighbour, pack a healthy lunch, and politely decline the world's less wholesome offerings. They know the first fresh garden tomato tastes as good as it does, partly, because you've waited for it since last Thanksgiving, and that the awful ones you could have bought at the grocery in between would only subtract from this equation.

Finally, she describes a calming awareness, almost spiritual in nature, which underlies the agrarian mindset.

Before I had read this book you're now holding in your hands, I would have hesitated to suggest that one's relationship to the land, to consumption and food, is a religious matter. But it's true; the decision to attend to the health of one's habitat and food chain is a spiritual choice. It's also political choice, a scientific one, a personal and a convivial one. It's not a choice between living in the country or the town; it is about understanding that every one of us, at the level of our cells and respiration, lives in the country and is thus obliged to be mindful of the distance between ourselves and our sustenance.

[...] In any weather I may hope to carry a good agrarian frame of mind into my orchards and fields, my kitchen, my children's schools, my writing life, my friendships, my grocery shopping, and the county landfill. That's the point: it goes everywhere. It may or may not be a movement - I'll leave that others to say. But it does move, and it works for us.

Every once in a while, I catch myself departing from the kind of thinking that becomes natural on the farm. Rather than the 'if it ain't broke, reuse it until you can't fix it anymore' mantra of my grandma, I'll walk by a store display and think, "Hmm... I would really like a pair of pants in a mildly different shade of blue to add to my collection." Or I'll find myself consuming 'nature' as if the trees and landscape that outlive me by multiples are a decoration to my life, not the other way around. That's when I know I need someone to hand me a shovel and bucket again, pointing to the horse stalls.

I find more peace, mindfulness, and meaning from trying to think like a farmer (or gardener for that matter) than I do from the highest moments in the champagne world I occasionally inhabit. So Barbara, it moves me too.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt.

Well, no... consuming more energy than we expend makes us fat, but let's talk about how our neighbourhoods play a role in that equation.

Academics have long been exploring the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics and obesity. There are many variables to either examine or control for, including physical layout of the built environment (suburban, rural, urban, and the myriad sub/cross-categories), socioeconomic status, availability of healthy and affordable food, etc. Depending on what you measure and which statistics you employ, you could probably make the needle swing any way you'd like. However, there are established links between daily hours spent in a car and obesity, and likewise between neighbourhood design/location and hours spent in a car. So we can reasonably suggest that if your neighbourhood forces you to spend more time driving and less time using active transportation, then you are more likely to struggle with obesity.*

OK, academic tip-toeing aside - time to make this real. Consider this passage from Shaping Neighbourhoods:**

The importance of neighbourhood design is highlighted by the fact that, for most obese adults, weight gain has been accumulated over a number of years. A small daily or weekly imbalance in this energy account [intake vs. expenditure] over a decade can lead to major weight gain. The Institute for European Environmental Policy has calculated that the decline in walking itself is enough to account for much, if not all, of the recently observed upsurge in obesity. [...]

Each additional hour a day spent in a car is associated with a 6% increase in the likelihood of obesity. Each additional kilometre walked a day (12 minutes) is associated with a 4.8% reduction in the likelihood of obesity (Frank et al, 2004).

I find this both bleak and exciting. The sad-face arrives when I think of all the layers stacked against walking in the suburban neighbourhood where I grew up and where my parents still live. There's the distance - just a little too far to carry a litre of milk and bag of apples home let alone groceries for a whole family. There's the noise of 60 km/hr x4 lanes, drowning out pleasant thoughts or conversation and passing uncomfortably close to the sidewalk. There's the general ugliness of it all - asphalt by the acre protecting architecturally vacant blah. There's the fact that there isn't really anywhere worth going within walking distance unless you loooove chain store shopping or unhealthy food. To put it lightly, the cards are stacked in favour of driving and when every day of your life you have to stare down that imbalance or else put on gram after gram of unused energy... that's tough.

On the other hand, the solutions to this - active lifestyles (not just an hour of gym time you tack on the end of your day) and healthy food - are beautiful. Is this not what we want anyway and were somehow cheated out of? Put it that way and cutting down population level obesity sounds like a really nice vacation not a strenuous and miserable slog on the treadmill.

Another fine quote:

To tackle population level obesity, whilst taking into account health inequalities and promotion of communties, the first urban agenda is to build activity back into every day lifestyles and movement patterns. The promotion of gyms and organized sports may be effective for some individuals, in some socioeconomic groups, for a limited period of time, but as a response to population level obesity, is not an adequate or effective strategy. The second urban agenda must be to ensure access to good quality fresh food including food growing opportunities at the local level (Barton et al, 2003).

When I read this, I think of my mom. She's an athletic lady who grew up working on the farm and playing sports. Even today, she walks my dog when he starts pawing at her face at 6 am and bikes to work despite the environment I depicted above. My mom does not want to buy a gym membership or run like a maniac five times a week and she shouldn't have to, especially as she is aging gracefully into a beautiful grandma (newly minted, not my doing). She's a naturally active person so it just makes way more sense to build activity in the fabric of life. That said, where would you rather walk and get healthy food?

Exhibit A - This could just as easily be a suburban format Loblaws, Sobeys, etc.

Exhibit B - One of several green grocers on Roncesvalles in Toronto. Dogs welcome.

For most people I speak to this is a very easy question. The tricky part is getting from Exhibit A to Exhibit B (which by the way has better, cheaper local produce than chain grocers - I used to live and shop there). Fortunately, I wrote a little book all about it!

More on this discussion later, especially the bit about Boomers like my mom.

Until then, thanks for reading!G

- - -

*There are dozens of published studies on this topic, but Frank (2004) does a great job summarizing the findings and points to many other references. Still, remember that transportation is not the only potential source of physical activity. Recreational exercise can obviously offset an imbalance in energy intake vs. expenditure. In fact, Rodriguez et al. (2006) studied the differential physical activity levels in a conventional car-dependent suburb with a neighbourhood designed to increase walkability. They found that while the walkable neighbourhood walloped the conventional suburb in terms of walking and cycling trips per week within the neighbourhood, these were almost exclusively in utilitarian travel. Recreational activity remained much the same and so physical activity between the two settings was not statistically significantly different. Just one study in a sea of many offering varying accounts...

I just walked my bike back from town. It didn’t occur to me that this was odd until I ran into a buddy en route who instantly started laughing. “What’s the use of the bike if you’re just going to walk it,” he asked. I pointed at the cargo in my basket and said, “To carry my helmet.” I’ve come to realize that a long walk alone with some music or falling snow is essential to my happiness. I make an effort to place myself at least 20 minutes away from home daily because the walk back invariably ends up being total zen, quite often constituting the best moments of my day.If you feel the need to slow the world down walking is just the ticket. When walking, the only thing you can do is enjoy the journey. For me, this means the minute I set out any deadlines or pressures are momentarily lifted. The world stops moving and nothing else matters except one foot in front of the other. There is no point fussing and fretting about how much work you need to do when you reach your destination or feeling guilty about wasting time. Walking is progress. It’s a satisfying accomplishment: point A to point B. It's an opportunity for my mind to release and flit around to all the thoughts that I’ve been trying to block out while staring at a screen or page of writing. Walking fills me with gratitude: for my warm jacket and the cool air; for the people and moments that have conspired to put me here; for the chance to spend my days slowly chipping away at big problems. Walking forces me to appreciate what’s up with the trees today and how the air feels on my cheeks. I become very aware that I’m human and every day is just a day. Walking makes me want to drop off my bag and keep walking forever. As a planning student and urbanist, I’m a huge proponent of walkability. Generally, it is accepted that people are willing to walk to places within a quarter-mile radius (half-mile radius if centred on a transit hub) which is perceived as a five-minute-walk.* This metric is sometimes disputed on the basis that good urban design and interesting streetscapes can generate a greater willingness to walk.** Also, I believe university towns can get away with more dispersion because young people are willing to walk further.*** When it comes to groceries and a corner store, I totally support the quarter-mile walkability goal. Carrying heavy bags of yogurt and canned chickpeas for miles is the pits. To be honest though, I’d prefer my classes or library to be a good 40 minute walk away (if it’s a pleasant, quiet walk). I think it makes me a better person and provides a reason to reflect and explore the area. Obviously this is easy for me to say as a young, healthy, mobile person. I don’t propose making commuting distances longer than they should be, but I would like to put the question out there: how do you feel about walking? How does it affect your relationship with your immediate built and natural environment? Are you a happier, calmer person because of your commute, or does the trip from home to work/school stress you out (and do you travel by foot, bike, car, bus, streetcar, etc.)?

* This is pretty widely acknowledged, but I came across it in the Sprawl Repair Manual, by Galina Tachieva.** There are a number of studies that have explored this. Steve Mouzon does a great job explaining.*** I recall hearing or reading this from Andres Duany but I can't find the link, so don't hold me or him accountable to that until I identify the source.

My lucky summer job has afforded me the opportunity to craft a sustainability program for a sizable number of people. We've developed some fun ways to build momentum before the launch, and this is one of our priming tools. By all means, roll your eyes at this 'personality quiz' - it's not meant to be taken too seriously. However, know that this preteen slumber party favourite has a purpose! My goal is to use the mysterious attraction of a personality quiz to affirm and encourage the good, sustainable behaviours that we already practice. I'm looking for feedback from people outside my work department. Please look out for any typos, step into my office and tell me... "How does this test make you feel?"

Retrospect is a beautiful thing. Do you ever find yourself gazing back into the foggy mist of the last 450 or so days of your life? It's comforting to me that each of those days seems to start the same way - with a cup of coffee - and then whips itself into a small piece of an ongoing journey. Whether acing an exam, reading a life-changing email, or discovering you wore your shirt inside-out all day and then committing to be more prudent, everything plays out one day at a time.

Let's just air my laundry now: I'm an overthinker. That fact makes retrospectating (sounds like a potential verb and makes the activity seem more sportive, so we'll take it!) all the more fun because I can take all of my seemingly divergent experiences and fit them into a pretty straightforward process like ducks in a row, waddling adorably to an end goal.

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Gracen

I really care about building up people, places, and systems that can endure. My life is borderline participatory action research. I am currently exploring city improvements via walkability, agriculture, and helpful people. I also make videos at anotherplaceforme.com